Ayn Rand Quotes on Objectivism

"I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. "

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter."

"Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives. "

"Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone. "

"The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see. "

"Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. "

"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me. "

"A government is the most dangerous threat to man's rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. "

"Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. "

"Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. "

"From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man – the function of his reasoning mind."

"I guard my treasures: my though, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom."

"The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes."

"Government "help" to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off. "